The indictment of Donald Trump on charges relating to his payment of “hush money” to a mistress to keep her quiet during the 2016 campaign was a long time coming. Trump has been a fixture in the New York media since the 1980s and thanks to his television show and constant efforts at self-aggrandizement, has created the conditions that have resulted in his indictment.
Trump had been an unknown developer until the 1980s when he renovated the Commodore Hotel — an important New York landmark — and built Trump Tower and Trump Plaza. This made the Queens businessman a real estate star in Manhattan’s high-society scene. From then on, Trump had a target on his back that never left him.
Trump enjoyed being in the news. But he realized that to stand out from the crowd he’d have to invent a new image: a swashbuckling, womanizing celebrity who craved the attention of New York’s gossip columnists.
“The final key to the way I promote is bravado: I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do,” Trump wrote in his 1987 best-selling book The Art of the Deal. “That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts.”
It was more than “a little hyperbole.”
Trump has denied the tryst but acknowledged personally reimbursing the Daniels payment. It’s a playbook that rings familiar for those who have followed his career in full: money and sex and the use of influence to squash unflattering stories. Only this time, the spectacle wasn’t just one for the tabloids but for the courts too. Two people familiar with the matter confirmed on Thursday that a charge was coming, the specifics of which were set to be revealed by the Manhattan district attorney in the coming days.
Trump’s move to Florida hasn’t changed anything. You might be able to take the man out of New York, but you can’t take the New York out of the man. The same tabloids that raised him up and plucked him from relative obscurity to make him world-famous are now gleefully reporting every detail of his indictment.
Trump is a creature of the city, and spent years using its ravenous and hyper-competitive media market to propel himself from an unknown outer-borough developer into Manhattan’s glitzy high-society scene. He struggled gaining acceptance with the city’s blue-blooded elite. He was deemed too loud, too gauche. He bristled at the criticisms but ultimately didn’t care to change; or maybe he just couldn’t.
If you live by the tabloids, you die by the tabloids. The fact is the ravenous appetite of the New York media to try to one-up each other in being the most spiteful, the most hateful toward the former president is nothing new. They do the same thing to any other celebrity who falls.
They take as much relish in kicking a person when he’s down as they did in building him up.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member